- Nature
- An Oration Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
- Walden; Or, Life in the Woods
- Leaves of Grass
- Aesthetic Papers
- Woman in the Nineteenth Century
- Passage to India
- Democratic Vistas
- Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs
- Years of Experience: An Autobiographical Narrative
- The Blithedale Romance
- Record of Conversations on the Gospels, Held in Mr. Alcott's School
Whitman acknowledge the debt this way: "I was simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought me to a boil." Thoreau wrote Walden, he said, to "wake his neighbors up" by "crowing as lustily as chanticleer in the morning." In Leaves of Grass, Whitman "sounds my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." An exhilarating combination of mysticism and sexuality, his poetry is a newer testament, a celebration of the kingdom of consciousness that can be found in the soul, in the body, in the "kosmos," and in all the forms of spirit and matter. Whitman urged his listeners to get outside and become "undisguised and naked:" "Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Few in his time even recognized his work as poetry, and on several occasions he was prosecuted for obscenity. This first edition of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman published himself, had almost no sale at all. Between 1855 and his death in 1892, Whitman kept adding poems to new editions of Leaves of Grass, and by the end of his life had acquired a few disciples. But it wasn't until the twentieth century that the literary critical establishment recognized him as one of the great American poets. To such anti-establishment figures as Allen Ginsberg (who 100 years after Leaves of Grass first appeared used the lines about "unscrewing the locks" as the epigraph to Howl) he was even greater as the prophet of cultural revolution.